Fight for female voters intensifies in Georgia Senate campaign

The supporters of Republican David Perdue and Democrat Michelle Nunn held dueling press conferences today on different themes near and dear to female voters in their campaigns for Georgia's open Senate seat.

For Nunn, it was an attempt to make sure the emerging gender gap, which we detailed here last week, widens. For Perdue, it was a chance to dint the notion that his female support is lacking.

We'll start with Perdue's presser, which focused on two EEOC complaints that Nunn's camp unintentionally exposed in the infamous series of memos that leaked this summer. State Rep. Lynne Riley and other GOPers wrote a letter demanding that Nunn release the complaints, which haven't been made public yet.

"The only way for Georgians to know the truth is for you to voluntarily release this information," said the letter. "Why haven't you done so already?"

(Nunn's campaign has called the issue a distraction, and today a surrogate, state Sen. Nan Orrock, used the term "smokescreen.")

They then marched over to Nunn's event to deliver that letter to the Democrat's campaign manager, a stoic Jeff DiSantis, as a few dozen Nunn supporters chanted "go blue" and "equal pay." As you can see in the above video, they were briefly held up by state troopers.

Once the Republican gaggle was out of earshot, the Democrats proceeded to pummel Perdue over whether he'd back the stalled-out Paycheck Fairness Act. That bill aims to narrow the persistent pay discrepancy between women and men.

"All we want to do is go to work and be treated as equals, leave behind gender-based discrimination," said Orrock, an Atlanta Democrat.

(His campaign said Perdue believes in equal pay for equal work. "That is the law and he has already supported that," said his spokeswoman.)

Neither candidate was there for the fireworks. But it made for an odd confrontation between two campaigns who recognize that women, who make up about 56 percent of the vote, could decide this election.